Prescient Sen. Warren, or Gullible PolitiFact?

PolitiFact claims it is "True" Democratic presidential hopeful Sen. Elizabeth Warren saw the financial crisis of 2008 coming.

After announcing in the deck that it was true Warren saw the financial crisis coming, PolitiFact did what it does on occasion: It gave us a fact check that offered hardly any evidence in support of its conclusion.

Having written about this some on Twitter and Facebook already, I can tell our readers that some liberals aren't going to want to admit that Warren claimed she saw a particular crisis coming. But the crisis she supposedly foresaw wasn't merely a crisis for some number of subprime borrowers facing foreclosure. It wasn't just a crisis of predatory lenders preying on people.

It was the crisis that saw many banks failing, lenders not lending and millions losing their jobs.


PolitiFact left no doubt it understood Warren was saying she foresaw that particular crisis, leading with the following:

Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren warned about the financial crisis of the 2000s before it happened, she claimed during a CNN town hall where she pitched herself as the best option for president in the 2020 election.

PolitiFact provided no reasonable evidence to show Warren saw that crisis coming. But it still somehow reached the conclusion it was true Warren saw the 2008 financial crisis coming.

We'll review the evidence PolitiFact quoted, the evidence PolitiFact linked and finally look at evidence PolitiFact did not bother to mention.

Sifting the Would-be Evidence 

We start with PolitiFact's presentation of Warren's claim (bold emphasis added):

Warren, a former Harvard Law School professor, told an audience of college students that her whole life’s work has been "about what's happening to working families.

"And starting in the early 2000s, the crisis was coming. I was waving my arms, ringing the bell, doing everything I could. I said families are getting cheated all over this country," Warren said April 22 in Manchester, N.H. "It started when the mortgage companies targeted communities of color. They targeted seniors. They targeted Latinos. They came in and sold the worst possible mortgages and stripped wealth out of those communities, and then took those products across the nation. I went everywhere I could. I talked about it to anyone who would listen, a crisis is coming."

But nobody wanted to listen, Warren said, "so the crisis hit in 2007, 2008, and just took us down."

Warren said she saw a crisis coming. It was the one that hit in 2007, 2008 and "just took us down." She supposedly saw that coming.

The next paragraph from PolitiFact constitutes a non-sequitur (logical fallacy) that characterizes the whole of the fact check:

We confirmed that Warren did raise the alarm about the looming housing and financial crisis. She spoke about debt, financial lending practices and other factors affecting families and the economy years before the financial crisis peaked in 2008.

Does talking about debt, lending practices and other factors affecting the economy and families mean that one has raised the alarm about a looming financial crisis? We say it doesn't unless one says something specific about a looming financial crisis that suitably matches the one we had in 2008.

This cupboard is bare.

We'll hunt through every quotation PolitiFact used and survey every article PolitiFact linked in support of Warren. We cannot quote these sources exhaustively because of copyright issues. But we'll give our readers far more than PolitiFact gave its readers.

PolitiFact:

Warren’s presidential campaign cited several blog posts and comments to media outlets in 2005 and 2006, and Warren’s 2003 book, "The Two-Income Trap," co-authored with her daughter, Amelia Warren Tyagi, as examples of Warren warning about subprime lending and an imminent housing crisis.

PolitiFact does not quote from the listed blog posts (we'll get to those later). Instead PolitiFact leads its presentation of evidence with a quotation from the book it mentions in the same paragraph:

"In the overwhelming majority of cases, subprime lenders prey on families that already own their own homes, rather than expanding access to new homeowners. Fully 80 percent of subprime mortgages involve refinancing loans for families that already own their homes," Warren said in the book. "For these families, subprime lending does nothing more than increase the family's housing costs, taking resources away from other investments and increasing the chances that the family will lose its home if anything goes wrong."

There is no warning of any crisis in that paragraph. There's a warning about borrowing money from the more expensive subprime market. But that warning makes sense regardless of the possibility of an impending financial crisis.

At the risk of understatement, we find PolitiFact's Exhibit A in support of Warren's claim underwhelming.

For Exhibit B, PolitiFact trotted forth part of a 2004 PBS interview:

"I think what the landscape shows is the middle class is under assault in a way that has not happened before in our history," Warren said. "Stagnant wages, rising costs, wildly rising debt. It's in everyone's interest to turn that back around."

Again, there is no warning of any crisis resembling the 2008 financial crisis. Instead, Warren bemoans the fact that the middle class is supposedly under assault. She mentions wages, costs and debt but doesn't tie them together into any type of specific threat.

 PolitiFact cited The New York Times as its Exhibit C:

Professor Warren of Harvard believes that disaster lurks as homeowners borrow against their homes to forestall bankruptcy. When the stock market tumbled five years ago, people in trouble could sell stocks to stay afloat, she said. But home equity doesn't work the same way. As she put it, "You can't sell a part of your home like you could a stock in the stock market bubble."

Like the two preceding exhibits, Exhibit C does not offer any warning of a crisis, unless we count the personal crisis faced by homeowners facing foreclosure. That is the subject of the article and the group facing lurking disaster. The article's kicker quote--from Warren--helps cinch the case.

PolitiFact's Exhibit D consists of comments from a representative of the conservative Housing Center at the American Enterprise Institute.

How did co-director Ed Pinto support Warren's claim that she saw the financial crisis coming?

PolitiFact:

Warren was "substantially correct" in her assessment that home prices were going up rapidly relative to incomes (particularly for households with a one wage earner), said Ed Pinto, co-director of the Housing Center at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank.

If Warren was right that home prices were going up rapidly compared to incomes then that means there was an impending crisis? One that matches the financial crisis of 2008?

Please, where is the logic (and wouldn't we love to see the interview questions PolitiFact posed to the experts it cited!)?

With its Exhibit E, PolitiFact teases us with a subheader designed to foster (false) hope: "Consumer advocate groups credit Warren for alerting about the crisis"

Now we're getting somewhere?

PolitiFact:

"I remember (Warren) talking about credit card abuses and how they were harming families," [Deborah] Goldstein said. "People were using credit to manage basic daily expenses."

Goldstein said that her group, also concerned about the imminent financial crisis, in the early 2000s communicated with Warren on what could be done about it.

Summing up, we have a secondary source--an interest group that agrees with Warren--saying it was concerned about an imminent financial crisis and "communicated with Warren on what could be done about it."

PolitiFact offers nothing from the Center for Responsible Lending that supports its subheader.

Exhibit F gives us yet another empty endorsement of Warren:

"I'd give then-professor Warren the credit for banging the drum and ringing the bell early on unfair financial practices," said Ed Mierzwinski, senior director of the Federal Consumer Program at the U.S. Public Interest Research Group. Warren was the "No. 1 go-to academic expert" in the mid-to-late '90s and 2000s in the debate over changes to the bankruptcy code, he said.

Credit where it's due: If "banging the drum and ringing the bell early on unfair financial practices" was the same as "banging the drum and ringing the bell early on the 2008 financial crisis" then we'd have something. Hearsay, perhaps, lacking documented evidence in support, but at least hearsay would be something.

Exhibits A-F add up to nothing.

PolitiFact goes on to list some of Warren's accomplishments, as though its list somehow contributes to the case that Warren warned about the 2008 financial crisis (we don't see it).

Quoting the unquoted Warren

PolitiFact used a number of hotlinks, presenting them as though they support Warren's claim but without quoting from them (and most often not even paraphrasing or summarizing them).

We'll go through them in the order PolitiFact used them.

Talking Points Memo: "Is Housing More Affordable?"

Sen. Warren wrote a short blog post on Dec. 12, 2005 criticizing an article on home mortgages by David Leonhardt. Warren appeared to dispute Leonhardt's too-rosy picture of housing affordability.

We don't see anything reasonably taken as a warning about a future national financial crisis. It's hard to even pick out a quotation carrying a hint of that suggestion (please read it for yourself, link above).

(B)y picking the reference point as the early 1980s rather than the 1970s or the late 1980s, the NYT is benchmarking off the worst housing market in the second half of the 20th Century. Because inflation was out of control and mortgage rates were stratospheric, home buying was curtailed and housing markets suffered. Is that what we want to hold up as the model for comparison?

We find Warren's presentation well short of apocalyptic.

Talking Points Memo: "Middle Matters"

The next link, from May 26, 2005, leads to an even shorter four paragraph blog entry. Warren warns about pressure on the middle class:

The middle class is being carved up as the main dish in a corporate feast.  Strugging with flat incomes and rising costs for housing, health care, transportation, child care and taxes (yes, taxes), these folks are under a lot of financial strain.  And big corporate interests, led by the consumer finance industry, are devouring families and spitting out the bones.

Warning that the middle class may not always be with us thanks to a smorgasbord of costs serves as a weak foreshadowing of an impending financial crisis. Indeed, that crisis threatened some of the entities Warren blamed for pressuring the middle class.

Talking Points Memo: "Is Housing More Affordable?"

The third blog post PolitiFact linked was the same as the first.

PolitiFact's sidebar source list links three blog posts from Talking Points Memo but the text of the fact check contains three hotlinks referring to "several blog posts."

We'll take this space to note that the titles Warren chose for her blog posts seem pretty tame if she's going all out to warn people about an impending financial crisis ("I went everywhere I could. I talked about it to anyone who would listen, a crisis is coming.")

Talking Points Memo: "Foreclosures Up, Mortgage Brokers Keep on Selling"

The fourth link (third blog post), from April 21, 2006, did contain a warning. It noted that home foreclosures were up and suggested the housing bubble nationally was perhaps close to popping:

So why aren’t the mortgage lenders cutting back now? The problem, says my friend, is that no single bank or investment house owns those mortgages any more. They have passed them along to huge securitized pools, held in diverse ownership. That means a lot less oversight to be sure the big picture on lending makes any sense. And besides, the Army keeps on offering high returns, at least in the short run.

Nationally foreclosures are up 7% this quarter. That’s well behind Boston’s big numbers, but Boston was a leader during the boom. Will it now lead in the bust?

Note: Warren used "Army" in her post to describe the abundance of mortgage sellers.

Housing bubbles that burst do not routinely lead to the financial crisis of 2008 (or similar ones). As for the lending market making sense, it likely would have made more sense in the early 2000s if Republicans and Democrats alike had resisted the temptation to interfere in those markets by pushing and incentivizing lax lending standards. Government regulation was one of the problems leading to the crisis.

Note to Sen. Warren: If you're trying your best to warn people about an impending crisis, try emphasizing that idea in the titles you choose for your articles warning about the impending crisis, like "Impending Crisis Looms" or something like that. The technique makes it look like it's an idea you're trying to emphasize.

Judgment on PolitiFact

PolitiFact used quotations from Warren that did not support her claim to justify calling her claim "True." We think that speaks to PolitiFact's incompetence and secondarily to PolitiFact's leftward tilt.

Judgment on Sen. Warren

Thanks to a commenter at PolitiFact's Facebook page, we found stronger evidence supporting Warren's claim than PolitiFact was able to find. The commenter recalled seeing Warren on PBS sounding some kind of warning. When we found a search result from before 2008 we reviewed the text of an interview with Warren. The last line from Warren was exactly the type of evidence needed to find some truth in her claim:

But they don't see an economic threat to the banks from these massive bankruptcies?

Right now, they think that everyone can keep feeding and that there are still plenty of families to gobble up before they all head over the cliff, financially. But I have to tell you, the numbers are worrisome.

Based on this answer alone, we think Warren could reasonably receive a "Half True" rating. She described a risk of mass foreclosures that would threaten banks. That's short of describing the extent of the 2008 financial crisis, but at least she described one of the basic elements that helped lead to that crisis.

On the other hand, we saw little in the historical record to justify Warren's claim that she vigorously tried to broadcast a warning about an impending national financial crisis.

Perhaps Warren made other statements that would reasonably support her claim. But PolitiFact's fact check was our focus.  It was mostly an accident that we did a better job than PolitiFact at finding evidence supporting Warren.

PolitiFact and the Contradiction Fiction

We consider it incumbent on fact checkers to report the truth.

PolitiFact's struggles in that department earn it our assessment as the worst of the mainstream fact checkers. In our latest example, PolitiFact reported that President Donald Trump had contradicted his claim that he had never said Mexico would pay for the border wall with a check.

We label that report PolitiFact's contradiction fiction. Fact checkers should know the difference between a contradiction and a non-contradiction.

PolitiFact (bold emphasis added):

"When during the campaign I would say ‘Mexico is going to pay for it,’ obviously, I never said this, and I never meant they're going to write out a check," Trump told reporters. "I said they're going to pay for it. They are."

Later on the same day while visiting the border in Texas, Trump offered the same logic: "When I say Mexico is going to pay for the wall, that's what I said. Mexico is going to pay. I didn't say they're going to write me a check for $20 billion or $10 billion."

We’ve seen the president try to say he never said something that he very much said before, so we wondered about this case.

Spoiler: Trump has it wrong.

We found several instances over the last few years, and in campaign materials contradicting the president’s statement.

PolitiFact offers three links in evidence of its "found several instances" argument, but relies on the campaign material for proof of the claimed contradiction.

We'll cover all of PolitiFact evidence and show that none of it demonstrated that Mr. Trump contradicted himself on this point. Because we can.

Campaign Material

PolitiFact made two mistakes in trying to prove its case from a Trump Campaign description of how Trump would make Mexico pay for the border wall. First, it ignored context. Second, it applied spin to one of the quotations it used from the document.

PolitiFact (bold emphasis added):

"It's an easy decision for Mexico: make a one-time payment of $5-10 billion to ensure that $24 billion continues to flow into their country year after year," the memo said.

Trump proposed measures to compel Mexico to pay for the wall, such as cutting off remittances sent from undocumented Mexicans in the U.S. via wire transfers.

Then, the memo says, if and when the Mexican government protested, they would be told to pay a lump sum "to the United States to pay for the wall, the Trump Administration will not promulgate the final rule, and the regulation will not go into effect." The plan lists a few other methods if that didn’t work, like the trade deficit, canceling Mexican visas or increasing visa fees.

We placed bold emphasis on the part of the memo PolitiFact mentioned but ignored in its reasoning.

If the plan mentions methods to use if Mexico did not fork over the money directly, then how can the memo contradict Trump's claim he did not say Mexico would pay by check? Are fact checkers unable to distinguish between "would" and "could"? If Trump says Mexico could pay by check he does not contradict that claim by later saying he did not say Mexico would pay by check.

And what's so hard to understand about that? How can fact checkers not see it?

To help cinch its point, PolitiFact quotes from another section of the document, summarizing it as saying Mexico would pay for the wall with a lump sum payment: "(Mexico) would be told to pay a lump sum 'to the United States to pay for the wall'"). Except the term "lump sum" doesn't occur in the document.

There's reason for suspicion any time a journalist substitutes for the wording in the original document, using only a partial quotation and picking up mid-sentence. Here's the reading from the original:

On day 3 tell Mexico that if the Mexican government will contribute the funds needed to the United States to pay for the wall ...

We see only one potential justification for embroidering the above to make it refer to a "lump sum." That's from interpreting "It's an easy decision for Mexico: make a one-time payment of $5-10 billion to ensure that $24 billion continues to flow into their country year after year" as specifying a lump sum payment. We think confirmation bias would best explain that interpretation. It's more reasonable to take the statement to mean that paying for the wall once and having it over with is an obvious choice when it helps preserve a greater amount of income for Mexico annually after that. And the line does not express an expectation of a lump-sum payment but instead the strength (rightly or wrongly) of the bargaining position of the United States.

In short, PolitiFact utterly failed to make its case with the example it chose to emphasize.

... And The Rest

 (these are weak, so they occur after a page break)

PolitiFact misses obvious evidence in Broward recount fact check

On Nov. 13, 2018 PolitiFact's "PunditFact" brand issued a "Pants on Fire" rating to conservative Ken Blackwell for claiming Democrats and their allies were manufacturing voters in the Florida election recount.

The problem?

PolitiFact somehow overlooked obvious evidence reported in the mainstream media. The Tampa Bay Times, former owner of PolitiFact before it was transferred to the nonprofit Poynter Institute, published a version of the story:

Broward's elections supervisor accidentally mixed more than a dozen rejected ballots with nearly 200 valid ones, a circumstance that is unlikely to help Brenda Snipes push back against Republican allegations of incompetence.

The mistake — for which no one had a solution Friday night — was discovered after Snipes agreed to present 205 provisional ballots to the Broward County canvassing board for inspection. She had initially intended to handle the ballots administratively, but agreed to present them to the canvassing board after Republican attorneys objected.

The Times story says counting the 205 provisional ballots resulted in at least 20 illegal votes ending up in Broward County's vote totals.

The Times published its story on Nov. 10, 2018.

PolitiFact/PunditFact published its fact check on Nov. 13, 2018 (2:24 p.m. time stamp). The fact check contains no mention at all that Broward County included invalid votes in its vote totals.

Instead, PolitiFact reporter John Kruzel gives us the breezy assurance that neither he nor the state found evidence supporting Blackwell's charge.

Our ruling

Blackwell said, "Democrats and their allies (...) are manufacturing voters."

We found no evidence, nor has the state, to support this claim. Blackwell provided no evidence to support his statement.

We rate this Pants on Fire.

Inconceivable, you say?



via GIPHY

PolitiFact's facts outpace the truth

"Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it"

--Jonathan Swift 

With the speed of the Interwebs at its disposal, PolitiFact on July 22, 2017 declared that no evidence exists to show Senator Bill Nelson (D-Fla.) favors a single-payer health care system for the United States of America.

PolitiFact based its proclamation loosely on its July 19, 2017 fact check of the National Republican Senatorial Committee's ad painting Nelson as a potential supporter of a universal single-payer plan.

We detected signs of very poor reporting from PolitiFact Florida, which will likely receive a closer examination at Zebra Fact Check.

Though PolitiFact reported that Nelson's office declined to give a statement on his support for a single-payer plan, PolitiFact ignored the resulting implied portrait of Nelson: He does not want to go unequivocally on the record supporting single-payer because it would hurt his re-election chances.

PolitiFact relied on a paraphrase of Nelson from the Tampa Tribune (since swallowed by the Tampa Bay Times, which in turn runs PolitiFact) to claim Nelson has said he does not favor a single-payer plan (bold emphasis added):

The ad suggests that Nelson supports Warren on most things, including a single-payer health care system. Actually, Nelson has said he doesn’t support single payer and wants to focus on preserving current law. His voting record is similar to Warren’s, but members of the same party increasingly vote alike due to a lack of bipartisan votes in the Senate.

There's one redeeming feature in PolitiFact Florida's summary. Using the voting agreement between two candidates to predict how they'll vote on one particular issue makes little sense unless the past votes cover that issue. If Nelson and Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) had voted together in support of a single-payer plan, then okay.

But PolitiFact downplayed the ad's valid point about the possibility Nelson would support a single-payer plan. And PolitiFact made the mistake of exaggerating its survey of the evidence. In declaring that evidence does not exist, PolitiFact produced the impression that it searched very thoroughly and appropriately for that evidence and could not find it because it does not exist.

In other words, PolitiFact produced a false impression.

"Another major step forward"

We tried two strategies for finding evidence Nelson likes the idea of a single-payer plan. The first strategy failed. But the second strategy quickly produced a hit that sinks PolitiFact's claim that no evidence exists of Nelson favoring a single-payer plan.

A Tampa Bay market television station, WTSP, aired an interview with Nelson earlier in July 2017. The interviewer asked Nelson if he would be willing to join with Democrats who support a single-payer plan.

Nelson replied (bold emphasis added):

Well, I've got enough trouble just trying to fix the Affordable Care Act. I mean, you're talking about another major step forward, and we're not ready for that now.

The quotation supports the view that Nelson is playing the long game on single-payer. He won't jeopardize his political career by unequivocally supporting it until he thinks it's a political winner.

PolitiFact's fact check uncovered part of that evidence by asking Nelson's office to say whether he supports single payer. The office declined to provide a statement, and that pretty much says it all. If Nelson does not support single-payer and does not believe that going on the record would hurt his chances in the election, then nothing should stop him from making his position clear.

PolitiFact will not jeopardize Nelson's political career by finding the evidence that the NRSC has a point. Instead, it will report that the evidence it failed to find does not exist.

It will present this twisted approach to reporting as non-partisan fact-checking.


Afters:

We let PolitiFact know about the evidence it missed (using email and Twitter). Now we wait for the evidence of PolitiFact's integrity and transparency.